Sunday, 11 September 2011

Nikki Maginnis has just done a short animated film to celebrate/promote a book collection, in which one of the stories is hers.

The collection is 'Steamlust: Steampunk Erotic Romance' edited by Kristina Wright. See the film on Vimeo, here. It's not quite out yet on Amazon but there's a link to it on the Vimeo page. And the video is very cool, which is what prompted me to post the link.

Steampunk - Victorian elegance and aesthetics meets futuristic invention and exploration. Think ray-guns made from brass and copper, Victorian fashion and giant mechanical lobsters for undersea exploration... Actually I don't know if ray-guns or mechanical lobsters made it in the book but it gives you an idea of what to expect. Cleis Press haven't formally announced which authors/stories are included but I gather it's a a roll-call of well-known erotica writers...

Monday, 5 September 2011

This is a very quick update because I'm working quite hard on a bunch of stuff, all of it now on short deadlines - including finishing a novel, a novella and some shorter fiction. And I've got a bunch of different things that I've run into over the last week or so that will eventually, I hope, make it as blogs here.

However, something that's occurred to be in the last few months is that increasingly there seems to be a genre of 'bondage performance' that includes proper shows, rather than just demos, in fetish clubs - often highly stylised, with lighting, music, technical props and so forth. There seem to be more or less impromptu bondage 'happenings' in places like fantasy conventions, where you spot a crowd and in the middle of it, there's a bamboo tripod and someone being suspended from it. And there are increasingly 'guerilla bondage' goings-on in which people turn up at some pre-agreed location - which might be an abandoned factory but sometimes now might be just outside your local public library - and some bondage goes on there, pics are taken and then everyone disperses.

Apart from what seems to be a renewed interest in rope bondage within the fetish community as a whole, I'm not entirely sure where this enthusiasm for public bondage as art has come from, or why. A lot of it actually appears within the fetish community, on people's Fetlife profiles and such: some of it, however, is quite public.

Examples of the 'bondage in an abandoned building' style come from all over, but among the best exponents, have a look at the Tumblr blog of the Baltimore Guerilla Suspension Crew.

There are plenty more examples that show bondage as a kind of artistic/aesthetic form that seems to be going increasingly mainstream and public performance orientated, but I'm not going to spend time producing dozens of links just to prove the point. You can use Google as well as I can, I'm sure. Alternatively, just trust me!

So does anyone have any interesting sociological explanations for the recent uptick of interest in bondage performance?